


Red and Purple

by DwarvenBeardSpores



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Beholding Avatar Powers (The Magnus Archives), Complicated Relationships, Episode 132: Entombed, Episode 133: Dead Horse, F/M, Fandom Trumps Hate, Fandom Trumps Hate 2020, Friendship, Gen, Gender Issues, Healing, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Violence, Kissing, Lipstick & Lip Gloss, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Non-Sexual Kink, Spoilers for The Magnus Archives Season 4, Touch-Starved, Trauma, background Daisy/Basira, background jon/martin, canon-typical context of past police violence, lipstick kink, self-depreciation, set sometime after, very brief allusion to s4 typical statement hunger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:00:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27909379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DwarvenBeardSpores/pseuds/DwarvenBeardSpores
Summary: Jon takes a breath and tries to find some sort of middle ground of knowledge. Enough to mean something. Not enough to hurt either of them.You’ve got a… an unopened lipstick in your pocket,” He begins. “Basira bought it on your request; you still haven’t left the institute. It used to be your favorite shade, but you haven’t put it on yet.”Daisy reaches a hand into her pocket and pulls out a small red tube. She looks at it. Looks at Jon with a raised eyebrow that could mean anything.
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 4
Kudos: 58
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2020





	Red and Purple

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Prim_the_Amazing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/gifts).



> Written for the Fandom Trumps Hate 2020 event. Prim_the_Amazing requested some JonDaisy queer nonsexual lipstick kink, and it was very fun to write. Thank you Prim for your ideas and incredible patience as I fussed, you were a delight to write for.
> 
> A note for my own piece of mind: this piece is obviously about Jon and Daisy and, necessarily, alludes to Daisy's context with violence and the police force. It is not a main focus, less emphasized in canon and does not go deep into the subject or my thoughts on it, but like, take care of yourselves.

“What do you see when you look at me?”  


Jon tears himself away from his papers with a start. He hadn’t forgotten Daisy was there, but he had gotten used to her. The way she stood in the corner of the room, avoiding the walls, leaning on the back of a chair when she needed to rest. It was almost comforting, knowing there was someone who wanted his company, even if it was really  _ anyone’s  _ company she was after.

“What?” he begins. “I-- I mean, you’re standing there, in, in an Archers shirt and sweatpants, and--”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I know  _ that _ . I wasn’t asking you to tell me what I put on this morning. I’m asking what you  _ see. _ ”

He Looks, and the door in his head creaks open and Knowledge washes over his face, sharpening his vision like a lens clicking into place. He sees Daisy, he Sees a great husk of the Hunt around her, dry teeth and claws with nothing to latch into. He Sees dirt under her fingernails and between her teeth, the way her skin bows inward as though being pressed on by a great weight. He Sees tendrils of the Lonely running through her chest and out her fingers, pushing him away, telling him not to look. He thinks he sees an eye, closed but immovable, just along her collarbone before he presses his face to his hands and slams the door in his mind shut. 

“That bad, huh?”

Jon takes one shaking breath, then another. “It’s… complicated.” 

“Right. Shouldn’t’ve asked.”

The air grows colder as she thinks about leaving. Jon’s pointedly not Looking but he can imagine wisps of smoke digging into her skin, taking her place, leaving them both alone.

“Why  _ did  _ you--” he begins, before catching himself. “Sorry, no.” He bites his tongue as he thinks. Questions come so easily, dart off his tongue, and when he’s thinking about  _ not  _ asking them it almost feels like they get more insistent. “I... don’t know what you were hoping I’d tell you.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“No, Daisy, I-- I’m sorry. Don’t go.”

She sways, plants her heels, doesn’t leave. Doesn’t answer his not-question, either, but that’s… Jon tries to convince himself it’s less important. They’re both silent. Jon takes a breath and tries to find some sort of middle ground of knowledge. Enough to mean something. Not enough to hurt either of them.

You’ve got a… an unopened lipstick in your pocket,” Jon begins. “Basira bought it on your request; you still haven’t left the institute. It used to be your favorite shade, but you haven’t put it on yet.”

Daisy reaches a hand into her pocket and pulls out a small red tube. She looks at it. Looks at Jon with a raised eyebrow that could mean anything. 

“You pulled your hair back today,” he says, “the way you used to, to get it out of your face, but when you brushed it you found dirt. You’ve been trying to convince yourself that the tightness of the elastic doesn’t bother you, but it does. Basira said--”

“It doesn’t matter,” Daisy snaps, “what Basira said. This isn’t about her.”

“Except it is.”

“ _ No.  _ It isn’t.” She glares, eyebrows furrowing into an expression that is both dangerous and weary, and Jon shuts up. It does matter what she said, ( _ “I miss you” _ ), but what she said wasn’t what she meant, which wasn’t what Daisy heard, and everything’s so jumbled Jon can’t really tell which is which. 

“Fine,” he says, and rubs his forehead like he can wipe all of it, any of it out of his mind. “Do you want to talk about what it  _ is _ about?”

Daisy is silent for several moments, sizing him up, shoulders tight as she, what, looks for any sign of weakness? No, she wouldn’t have to look that hard. Jon is all weakness.

Then she drops her head. “Fine,” she says, a dull echo.

“Right. Good.”

She twists the cap on her lipstick and doesn’t open it. The movement is familiar, Jon can feel it in his fingers. “I don’t know,” she says finally, “what parts of me were  _ me,  _ and what was the Hunt. Being in the Coffin stopped everything, replaced everything with rock. But there must have been some things…” 

“Some things that were just  _ you _ .”

“Yeah.” 

“And you were wondering if I Knew what those were.”

“It was stupid.”

“Daisy.”

She looks up. “I just want them back, okay?”

Jon sighs. “I don’t-- I can’t See that distinction,” he says. “I’m sorry. But I could, I don’t know, I could help you think through some of it? Figure, ah, figure it out?”

“I--” Daisy shudders, reaches up and tugs the elastic from her hair. It falls around her shoulders, and they both ignore the dusting of grit that falls to the floor, that keeps falling as she runs her fingers along her scalp. “Oh that feels better.”

Jon has dirt under his fingernails, too. He clenches his hands into fists into rocks to resist the urge to pick. The dirt won’t go away whatever he does.

“I want you to watch,” she says. “And make sure that I don’t… that it doesn’t wake the Hunt up.”

“Oh,” Jon says. “Yes. Of course.” He picks up his papers (not statements, not this time) and tucks them into a folder which he pushes to the side of his desk. The air feels a little warmer. The Lonely less strong. It’s like putting a cardigan on when you’re waiting for a bus in a blizzard; it doesn’t solve anything, but it… helps. A bit. “Whenever you like.”

“Right.” Daisy paces from one wall to the other, measuring the distance, making sure the room hasn’t closed in on itself. She approaches his desk and takes a breath. “Right,” she says again, and twists the lipstick open.

It’s red, bright, matte. It’s the color Daisy wore when she first gave Jon her statement, when she put a knife to his throat in Mike Crew’s house. He blinks and he sees it sharp and bright on her lips around bared teeth, and it’s blood filling her mouth, dripping down her chin, and it’s lipstick again, smeared across her face in the heat of a fight, and it’s applied cleanly now, twisted into a snarl, and--

His head spins. “Daisy, wait.”

She hardens at whatever she sees on his face. “Oh.”

“Maybe.” He swallows. “Maybe not that shade.”

She lets out a frustrated breath and tosses the lipstick onto the desk, where it rolls until Jon stops it with his palm. “Great.” She bites the word out of the air. “Lipstick gone too, then. Of fucking course.”

“You could try another color,” Jon says. “I, I mean, I think it was--”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

The chair in Jon’s office is for anyone who has a meeting with him, as though that kind of normalcy mattered anymore. It’s for Daisy, too, if she wants, although she’s repeatedly denied it. Now, she folds in on herself, bowing beneath the weight of Jon’s vision, once again eschewing the chair entirely to slump on the ground before Jon’s desk. He hears the dull thump of her head as it knocks against the wood.

Jon takes a breath.

“Daisy.”

She doesn’t answer.

He slides the bottom drawer of his desk open, aches oddly as he bends over to shuffle through irrelevant debris that seems to clump around his hand. Not having all his bones… it’s still weird. He seizes on a tube. Purple and silver. A different brand, a different color, a different intent entirely. He weighs it in his palm and thinks of Daisy and he Sees nothing.

“Try this one,” he says, and rolls it across his desk. It tips over the edge, a last flash of color, and Daisy huffs as she catches it before it hits the floor.

Then there is silence. Perhaps he’s made a terrible mistake.

“I haven’t used it?” Jon offers.

“Why do you have this?” Daisy asks, wary. “Did the big eyeball give it to you?”

“What? No, I just. I had it. Have done, for… a few years, I think.”

“Huh. And it’s not going to  _ do _ anything to me?”

“Not that I… er. No. No, I don’t think so.”

“Real reassuring, aren’t you, Sims.”

Jon sighs. Rubs his eyes. “It’s not connected to the Hunt,” he said. “If anything, it’s got ties to the Vast, but I don’t-- those are superficial, at best.”

There is a shuffling noise, and then Daisy lifts her head above the edge of the desk to squint at him. “Is this a game to you? Try to balance bits of horror until Daisy feels like a person again? Cause I’m not about to--” 

“No!” Jon blurts. “No, that’s not. I was just-- I wanted to do the opposite of make you suspicious? I was trying to explain.”

He can hear the grit grind between her teeth. “Try. Harder.”

He takes a breath that doesn’t sit right in his chest. “It was my first year as Head Archivist,” he says. “I… I finished work and on my way home I had the urge to go out and buy some lipstick. For my own use. Just. Just at home.” He doesn’t mention the months, years? That the idea had been tucked away in his mind, waiting for later. Doesn’t mention the way he held the lipstick in his pocket, not daring to put it on but feeling accomplished, somehow, just to have it. “I- in the early days I used to have. Issues with some of the statements. It might’ve been the Beholding? But it might also have been a-- an empathy thing? Or both I-- I would sometimes take on speech patterns or mannerisms from the statement givers, or see myself in a mirror and expect to look. Different.”

“Get to the point.”

Jon winces. He looks down at the desk and very pointedly does not pick up the abandoned red lipstick. “The next day I came into work, and I saw some follow-up. The statement I’d just read had been given by a young woman with ties to the Vast, who, there was a picture of her, she wore lipstick in a very similar shade to what I’d picked out. And that was it. It maybe hadn’t ever been my choice.”

He waits for Daisy to tell him it was a coincidence. A stupid hang up, something not worth even mentioning. Not worth bothering him years later.

She doesn’t.

“Right,” she says.

“It should. It should be safe for you to use.” He swallows down any last regrets about giving it away, about not trying again. About not having this conversation with… it’s just, Martin would have had something to say about it? Probably? If Jon would have ever brought it up. Which he hadn’t.

He can feel her eyes on him as she hauls herself to her feet, steadies herself against the desk. “Right,” she says again. 

He forces himself to look up. “I’m watching.”

“I didn’t-- Yeah.”

Every movement feels weighted, deliberate. The tug of the cap, the twist of the tube. Daisy doesn’t have a mirror, he realizes belatedly, and he’s about to say something, but she moves with a practiced efficiency, brushing her hair back from her face with one hand and pressing the makeup to her lips with the other.

There’s something vicarious in it. In the flash of color blooming across her pale face, the way it drags on her skin. Jon feels a rush in his chest of, of  _ something, _ and bites his own lip. 

A few strokes and it’s done. She presses her lips together to even out the color. Recaps the tube. Sighs and flexes her hands, stretches her mouth, feeling out the nuances of this new change. Her neck and jaw relax almost cautiously as she settles in.

The Hunt doesn’t so much as growl.

“It looks,” Jon begins. “It looks good.”

“Did I ask?”

“Yes, actually? I don’t have much of an opinion on colors, but you’re, ah, you’re  _ you. _ ” 

“Oh. Yeah.” She smiles, a slight twitch that, with her lips as dark as they are, is impossible to miss. “Thanks.”

“Of course.”

She uncaps the lipstick again and applies another coat. She takes her time on this one, but it’s still a finite action. A few moments at best. 

“It feels…” She takes a breath. “It feels good. You’re  _ sure  _ it’s not dangerous?”

“It’s not something I could makeup _ ,” _ Jon says before he can stop himself.

There is a beat of expectant silence. 

Daisy narrows her eyes.

“Are you making a joke?” she demands. “Now?”

“I… maybe?”

She sighs, presses a hand to her eyes, but there’s an expression in her mouth that’s almost amused. He doesn’t do jokes well. He’ll count this as a win.

“Alright, your turn.”

“What?”

“Your. Turn.” She leans heavily on the desk in a way that might once have been intimidating. That kind of still is. “We did a trade. The kind I can’t wear for the kind you can’t.”

The red lipstick is in Jon’s hands, and he doesn’t remember picking it up. “I--”

“The Hunt doesn’t have anything over you,” she says. “And it’d look nice.”

He wants to know. He doesn’t want to know. He twists the cap between his fingers.

“Wear it around and you might lure Martin back.”

“No,” Jon says, half a laugh as something in his chest seizes up. “No no no, if you’re not talking about Basira, then I’m not talking about Martin.”

“Fair point. But you said it yourself. You’ve been waiting for years.”

They sit and stare at each other. The purple brings out the dark circles around Daisy’s eyes in… not in a bad way. In a way that makes her look alive.

Sitting together, painting their faces and hoping it means something… he could make ties to the Stranger, probably, come up with some theory of falseness, but right now there’s nothing false about it. It just feels like a very human thing to do.

“I don’t know how to-- I-- I haven’t got a mirror?”

“I’ve got you, Sims.”

It’s an effort for her to push upwards enough to sit on the desk, but she does, and gives Jon such a fierce glare while doing it that he doesn’t even offer to help. She sits, catches her breath, and then turns until she is facing Jon, legs hanging off the lip of the desk on either side of his body. She pulls the red lipstick out of his fingers.

“You trust me?”

He blinks and for a moment the lipstick is red-slick blood across her hand, but then it’s gone. And he… he’s made the decision to trust her. Not forgive her, but trust her. He does. He will.    


“Yes.”

She twists off the cap, and his heart thuds, and... it’s fine. It’s still fine when she grasps his jaw to hold him still, when she tilts his head upwards to get a better angle. He tries to watch but there’s not much to see; a tug of concentration in her eyebrows, the rise of her hand, and then he feels the waxy press of lipstick to his mouth.

His breath catches.

The feeling is not easily cataloged. The makeup is barely cool, it slides slowly across his lips leaving a thick residue of red behind. She paints his lower lip, then his upper, then goes over each again.

“Together,” she says, and when he hesitates, smacks her lips in demonstration.

John mimics her, taking note of the waxy taste that’s like… candles, maybe? It’s strange and at the same time not at all unpleasant. He can feel the entire institute leaning in, watching, recording. It feels like everyone in the entire world can see him except himself.

“How-- how does it look?”

“You’re the one with all the eyes,” Daisy says, but as he opens his mouth to protest, that he doesn’t  _ want  _ to be that thing and she of all people should  _ know, _ she says, “it looks good, Sims.” 

“I-- it does?”

“Yeah. Real pretty.”

“Oh. Right.” He’ll look for himself later, temporarily grateful for the empty hallways as he ducks into the restroom and leans on the sink. Just like years ago, he won’t quite recognize his face, the vivid color putting him off balance, but this time... that’s not a bad thing. For the first time in years, the first thing he notices will not be his eyes.

For now he takes Daisy at her word, and she caps the lipstick and then smudges her thumb by the corner of his mouth to even things out. She’s still holding his chin and he… he hadn’t been expecting… the touch is so…

“Thanks?” he offers. His whole body seems to have gone a bit weird.

For a while they just sit like that, Daisy’s calves knocking against his legs, Jon stretching his mouth to adjust to the feeling of makeup, wondering how quickly he’ll worry all the color off. Neither of them know quite what to say. Neither of them can be someone other than who they are.

“I think,” Jon says finally. “I think Basira will be happy for you.”

Daisy shrugs. “We’ll see.”

“Are you going to show her?”

“Maybe. Are you going to show Martin?”

“I don’t think I could find him if I wanted to.”

“Hmmm. Then I suppose we’re going to have to be enough.”

Daisy reaches her arm out slowly, telegraphing her moves in ways that feel unnatural. Maybe it’s because she’s not trying to catch him off guard, or maybe he’s just gotten better at watching her. She presses her hand to the side of his chest, right over the soft spot where his ribs had been. He twitches. She could do some damage there, with a weapon or even just with her hand. With the pressure of a limb too heavy from dirt under the skin. 

But she doesn’t harm him, just holds him still, her hand rising and falling with his breaths.

With her other hand she tilts Jon’s head back, exposing his neck, and it’s a show, he thinks, of how far she’s come. He closes his eyes.

Years ago she tried to kill him with a knife across his throat. The scar is still there, a reminder that he has been hunted and caught. Now she leans forward, and Jon swallows, and his hands clutch the chair, and he trusts.

She presses her lips to his neck, right over the scar. Jon knows without knowing that she’s leaving a lipstick kiss, a temporary mark, a bruise that he can easily wipe away. He shivers. She is using lips and hands, not teeth and claws, and still. He is all weakness.

“I’m not a hunter anymore, Jon,” she says. Her breath is hot on his skin, and he feels warmer than he has in months. “And you’re not-- you don’t have to be-- whatever it is you don’t want to be.” 

“Oh th-that’s  _ very _ reassuring.”

“Yeah, well.”

He wants to kiss her somewhere, now, he thinks. Wants to leave a harmless bloom of red on her skin that is not blood, that was never meant to be. He lifts a hand and she tenses, but lets him turn her head and lean up so he can kiss her on the temple, another vulnerable place, just beside her eye. It’s not elegant, smears a bit on her eyebrow. He wishes that somehow it had been more precise.

“Real original, Sims,” she says, and her dark lips twitch into what might almost be a smile.

Jon’s lets his red ones echo the movement.

The quiet that follows isn’t lonely, isn’t crushing. It’s not the quiet of looking for openings or preparing to strike at them. It’s just quiet.

Jon opens the top drawer of his desk and tucks the red lipstick safely away. The purple goes into Daisy’s pocket. After a while, she nods and slides off his desk and Jon returns to his work, the taste of wax still clinging to his lips. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I'd love to know what you thought. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr as dwarven-beard-spores and twitter as @beardspores.


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